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Mark Wilson-Thomas joins John to announce the launch of the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010! Mark shows off several impressive, new features in the Visual Studio 2010 designer that work for both Silverlight and WPF development. Some key new features
that are covered include:

New interactive design surface

Working with Styles and Resources

Go To Value Definition lets you directly locate nested styles

Using the new "Data Can" to pinpoint data hookups

Moving stuff around in complex Grid panels using the new right click "goodies"

At the 20:34 minute point in the video, Mark has the cursor on a DataGrid, and it shows some items in the Property Grid called "Generate Columns", "Remove Columns", and "Edit Property-Bound Columns". I thought "Cool, you can now generate columns later
on in the development cycle" (after that first drag and drop manuever).

But I downloaded the latest bits, and I don't have those same options in the Property Grid. What's up? Is this a feature that didn't make it into the Release bits?

The features you are seeing are part of the design-time capabilities for the WPF version of the DataGrid control which I was using at that point in the demonstration. Unfortunately these features are not yet in the Silverlight version of that control -
I will pass along your feedback to the Silverlight team to let them know you'd like to see them in future releases.

Video is the most effective way to demo working in a complex UI. Doing things and showing what happens in other areas of the UI, especially when you are taken to a "sub-context", a mini-editor, a details explorer, is easier to produce and more efficient
to learn from than reading typical numbered step procedures even with screencaptures (I write docs for a living).

I agree with Ben this was a great intro and would also welcome a longer more comprehensive version showing more of what can be done. We've been working in XAML [VS] and now have these great timesaving features. Some capabilities could be discovered rt-clicking
everywhere, but more visual demos of what's possible will help us to recall what's possible when needed. IMO.

Not directly related to this post but the Right Click in the properties windows shows a misspelled context menu item 'Go to Value Defintion', as shown in this video. If I wasn't so lazy I'd find the right place to report this...

..Should have refreshed this page before posting! Glad it's not just my eyesight. On the same note the VS team have been great at responding to feedback especially during beta2 for performance issues, kudos to them.

Thanks for the typo report all - yes, we spotted that during the making of the video; unfortunately it was too late for a small fit-and-finish bug to make the bar for holding up the release. We're sorry about that. We hope you think the feature is useful,
and we will fix the typo in the next major release.

Thanks a lot for all of the interest in seeing more details of the designer features. There's already a ton of useful material on using the Visual Studio 2010 designer over on our Cider Blog at
http://blogs.msdn.com/wpfsldesigner/pages/learn.aspx - and we are adding more there too, so do keep checking back.

We'll also work with John and others to fill in the gaps and help you be productive - I'd love to hear from you all on the kinds of topics you'd like more detail on - the team monitors the
WPF and Silverlight Designer forum, so post away over there.

For those who are coming along to TechEd USA in a few weeks time, you may be interested to hear that myself and Mark Boulter will be giving a session there which covers a number of useful Tips and Tricks for using the designer. We'll show the material I
covered in this video plus a number of other topics, and there will be time for questions. We'll also have a full feedback session. Hope to see some of you in New Orleans!

DEV313 | Making the Most of the Microsoft Silverlight and WPF Designer in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Whenever a XAML Window, Page or UserControl is loaded in design view (i.e. you can see the design pane with a preview of your design or the Intentionally Left Blank message), the Properties Window should be active if it is shown, and show the Property Marker
for all properties in view for the selected piece of XAML (wherever your cursor is in the XAML file).

If the page in question is a resource dictionary, like the one I showed in the video, you will need to use the same trick I did in the video to get the Properties Window to "light up" - show the split view, then click on the design pane (which doesn't show
by default for RDs). Do this by:

1. Clicking on the split view button in the splitter bar which contains the Design and XAML Tabs (there are two split view buttons at the right hand end of the splitter bar, one vertical and one horizontal - vertical looks like a box with a vertical line
through the middle, the horizontal the same with a horizontal line through the middle)

2. Clicking on the Grey "Intentionally Left Blank" view shown in the Design tab

This should "wake up" the Properties Window for the Resource Dictionary.

Once the Properties Window is "lit up", the property marker (the little widget to the right of the label for each property and to the left of its value) should allow you to click on it and see "Apply Resource" (along with Apply Databinding, Reset Value,
and Go To Value Definition) in the drop down menu.

Click on Apply Resource in the Property Marker menu, to see the resource picker window.

If you do this for a Style, the picker will show the available styles.

Hope this helps!

If not, can you say whether you are not seeing the property marker, not seeing the picker when you click Apply Resource, or not seeing your resources in the picker once it appears?

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